As an automobile door, such as a slide door, a power assisted slide door has been used, in which the door is slidably opened or closed with a power assist mechanism. This door is sometimes called as a power slide door (PSD). In some of such power slide doors, a so-called remote controlled door operation system is installed for power assisted opening and closing of the door by an operation of a switch provided near the driver's seat or a remote controlling by a wireless switch attached to an engine ignition key or by a user operation (manual operation) of a door handle on the vehicle door.
Concerning the remote control operation for opening and closing a door by the user operation of the door handle as mentioned above, according to one known state of the art, the powered door operation (power assist open/close operation) is started after the door handle has been manually operated by the user from the fully opened or closed door position up to a certain position. One example of this type is disclosed in a Japanese Patent Publication No. 10-280806 A, in which the door handle is manually operated to open the door from the fully closed position to a position where a slide door courtesy switch mechanism or a half-latch switch mechanism is actuated and thereafter the power assist mechanism assumes the rest of the opening operation.
However, in such conventional system, when the door is operated for a vehicle exposed to a very cold weather condition, or for a vehicle with the door being installed insufficiently (not well-built condition), a greater operation force is required to operate the door under such condition and even the manual operation to move the door to a preset position, from where the powered operation assumes, is difficult. If such condition occurs, the power slide door operation would not be started. This is inconvenient for the user of the vehicle who needs to use such power system for some reasons such as convenience.
Accordingly, the invention pertains to improve the vehicle door control method and system which can improve the convenience for the user of the vehicle by improving the door operation of the vehicle door under A bad condition, such as under the vehicle being exposed to a very cold weather or the vehicle door being not well built to the vehicle.
In order to attain such improvements, the inventors of the applicants reviewed various aspects with respect to the conventional problems. For example, in the remote control power assist system using a switch provided near the driver's seat or by a wireless switch to achieve powered operation, the following improvements have been proposed. Normally, in this system, when the driver's seat switch or the wireless switch is operated, latch releasing actuator is operated to release the engagement of the door lock for door open/close operation. After the door lock is disengaged, the power assist mechanism is operated to slide or swing the door in the opening direction giving a power from a power source. Considering this operation mechanism, the inventors added the similar function to the power slide door mechanism of user operation by the door handle. In other words, when the user operates the door handle for opening purpose, the latch releasing actuator is operated to automatically release the lock by an electrical mechanism. Thereafter the power assist mechanism starts its powered door opening operation.
However, in the conventional power slide doors or the power slide doors, which are actually used, generally the lock disengagement operation is manually performed by operating the door handle by the user upon power slide door operation. This is because the door lock disengagement can be mechanically or structurally achieved in a moment when the door handle is operated utilizing the motion (pulling or pushing the door handle) of such operation. Compared with this, it would be very difficult to achieve the same function for the case of the powered door slide operation by the user operation of the door handle. In this case, a detection switch for detecting the user's handle operation has to be additionally provided for actuating the latch releasing actuator and further a judging time has to be set to prevent erroneous operation of the detection switch. Such judging time is set to be a predetermined time (one second or so) to see whether the detection switch correctly detects an intended door handle operation as is the same with the driver's seat switch, which is usually pushed down for a preset time to eliminate any noise or inadvertently generated signal. For the driver, it would be inconvenient to grip the door handle for a time to let the detection switch to inform his or her intent to open or close.
Considering the above problems for the power assist door opening operation, the inventors further reviewed the state of art and reached a new invention.